coastal alt/indie rock

​​Field Notes​​

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“This Is Babylon” came out of my Sausalito sessions in January 2022, a burst of writing that produced a surprising number of songs. For several days, I had my guitar, my laptop, and a rare amount of creative momentum. Some songs began with guitar effects. This one came from what I think of as the drum day.

 

I had bought a drum plug-in associated with Butch Vig, who produced Nirvana and plays drums for Garbage, among many other things. I’ve always been a fan of Butch, so I spent an entire day playing with his drum sounds, beats, and patterns. I would let a beat run and then see where the guitar wanted to go.

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That was the whole process.

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The riff at the beginning of “This Is Babylon” was the last piece I wrote that weekend, but it came fast. It had that aggressive, grunge-leaning drive to it — the kind of thing that makes you sit up when you’re writing because the track already seems to know what it wants. But then, as often happens in my songs, the chorus pulled it in another direction. The verses had grit and pressure. The chorus opened up into something much more melodic, almost pop in its shape.

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Lyrically, I’d had the title “This Is Babylon” in my head for a while. I knew the archetype, or at least I thought I did: Babylon as a symbol of temptation, decadence, power, corruption, spectacle. But I realized I didn’t really know much about Babylon itself, so I spent a couple of days researching the actual history, the biblical reputation, and the way the word has come to represent a machine that dazzles and consumes.

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From there, the parallels to Hollywood were obvious.

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I’ve spent enough time in Los Angeles, and seen enough reality TV, competition shows, documentaries, and news stories to be understand the machinery of fame. People are told they can be dancers, queens, angels, idols, stars. They can have everything. But the last line is always the one that matters: if they are willing to go that far.

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That is the real subject of the song.

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The first verse is full of promises.

 

"You dreamed you could be a dancer. You dreamed you could be a queen. You dreamed you could be an angel shining on the silver screen. They said you could be an idol. You could be a star. You could have everything."

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Then the second verse asks what gets traded for all of that. You follow directions. You fall from bed to bed. You kneel and pray before the altar and repeat every word they said.

 

By the end, you may have gotten what you wanted, but every title has changed meaning.

 

Now you’re a dirty dancer.

Now you're a toppled queen.

Now you're a fallen angel.

And the question at the end of the bridge is the only question that really matters:

 

Was that your dream?

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When I played the song for a songwriting cohort I was in at the time, the reaction was interesting. Some people seemed surprised that I didn’t take a clearer stance, that I didn’t write the song as an outright condemnation of the whole system. I understood the comment, but I also knew that wasn’t the song I was trying to write.

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I wasn’t trying to be cynical. I was trying to bear witness.

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That phrase matters to me.  My songs are not typically sermons. They are not verdicts. They are cameras. They point at something and let it be seen. That doesn’t mean I have no sense of right and wrong.

 

It means that in a song like this, the final judgment belongs to the person who made the bargain. If someone trades some part of their life, some part of their innocence, maybe some part of their soul, for wealth and fame, you would have to ask them if it was worth it. Some would say yes. Some would say no.

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“This Is Babylon” leaves the camera running.

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As soon as I started writing it, I saw it cinematically. That happens to me a lot. When I get stuck on a song, one of the first things I ask is: What would the video look like? What would play out on screen? Who are these characters? What are they wearing? What kind of rooms are they walking into? What is the plot line? The answers become part of the landscape of the song.

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And that is one of the things that makes “This Is Babylon” different from a lot of the songs I’ve been writing more recently.

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In the last few years, I’ve often written by sitting in an actual landscape and pulling the song out of what’s in front of me: the coast, the mission, the promenade, the river, the beach, the town, the weather.

 

But “This Is Babylon” came from a landscape that had already been sitting inside me for a long time. Hollywood. Fame. Spectacle. Desire. Compromise. The altar of becoming somebody else.

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I don’t think one way of writing is better than the other. Sometimes I write from the landscape in front of me. Sometimes I write from the landscape inside me.

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“This Is Babylon” came from the second place.

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